Maddux Report - Tampa Bay's Business, Finance and Development Magazine

From Lemonade to Computers
by Bridget McCrea

Tampa native Tyler Dikman is just 18,but already has a $1 million
business with branches here,in New York City and Los Angeles.
Last year,he made his mother proud by graduating from high
school.

Tyler Dikman’s lemonade stand looked nothing like the typical five-year- old’s first business venture. Not willing to settle for a folding table, pitcher of lemonade and a 5-cents-a-cup sign, Dikman snagged a Bacardi Rum cardboard cutout from the loca liquor store, covered up liquor-related signs on it and suspended real lemons from the top of it with string.

Dikman and his kindergarten pals outfitted the stand with a working cash register, and rounded out their product mix with a gumball machine and cracker jacks. “We placed signs along the street to attract customers,” Dikman recalls. “Sometimes we’d pull in as much as $20 an hour.”

That early business experience parlayed into more successful ventures for young Dikman, including a stint as a magician at 10 and an internship at Merrill Lynch at 14. In 2000, while he was still attending Jesuit High School, the Tampa native founded CoolTronics (www.cooltronics.com), a full-service

computer supply company that today has nine employees, three locations and $1 million in annual sales. Though he was hob-knobbing with the likes of Bill Gates on one front, he was still a teenager with a mother telling him to finish his homework. He sported a Rolex watch. Last June he achieved one more major milestone: he graduated from high school.

Dikman started out as a computer consultant, helping neighbors fix and upgrade their desktops. After hooking up with Dell in 2001, he started selling, maintaining, upgrading and repairing the computer manufacturer’s products to small and mid-sized companies in the Tampa Bay area, Silicon Valley (where Dikman is currently attending Santa Clara University and majoring in business management) and New York City.

The MADDUX REPORT talked to 18-year-old Dikman, president and chief executive of CoolTronics, about what it’s like to head up a successful technology company at his relatively young age:

Maddux Report: When the rest of the 15-year-old boys were out playing sports and hanging out, what drove you to open your own company?

Tyler Dikman: I’ve been in business for most of my life. After the successful lemonade stand, I got my first job at Merrill Lynch when I was 14. I’ve been fortunate to have a good business sense, the support of my parents and a knack for networking with people. I got into the technology realm by fixing computers for people for $10 to $15 an hour, and ended up finding something that I really enjoyed doing. I then learned the ropes and taught myself all of what I know about computers by making mistakes. I’ve used these advantages and experience in a manner that benefits myself and others, particularly the other young people who work for my company.

MR: How supportive were your parents and other people around you?

TD: Everyone was extremely supportive, and that made the difference. While there were a few hurdles here and there with being a kid and not being old enough to sign contracts and sometimes people not taking me seriously, 90 percent of the time it was all great. In fact, it was even greater than if I was older because people always want to help out a kid, knowing later that they were one of the people that got a young person started in business.

MR: How did you set up and finance CoolTronics’ physical locations and operations?

TD: Well, this year my parents were quite relieved when I went away to school and things calmed down at their house, where we used to get 50 to 100 boxes via UPS every week. My parents were sad that I was moving away, but happy to get their house back. Even now we have no office space at all. We have very low overhead, haven’t taken on any debt or financial investors and have only part-time employees who work without benefits at this point. Here in California, I’m running things out of my dorm room, while the Tampa location is based in my parents’ home (though five employees in Tampa work from their own homes), and a friend in Manhattan also runs his operations from his New York University dorm room. We do plan to have an office very soon; it’s just a matter of finding the right space.

MR: How do you reach your customers?

TD: We do absolutely no paid advertising whatsoever; it’s all word of mouth. Because of this, new clients know what to expect from our company and we know what to expect from them. Because we also provide the networking, upgrades, training and repairs on the products that we sell, we’re handling complete solutions for our small business and professional customers, and word has spread pretty quickly. Most of our customers will come to us and say, “I want to be able to do this, this and this” or “I just started my company, what do I need to do to get up and running?” That’s our cue to take the ball and run, handling every detail the customer needs to get up and running – even if it involves scheduling high-speed Internet service installation for them. We do it all.

MR: What’s the best thing about being a young entrepreneur?

TD: Being able to hire all of my friends and give them executive titles is very exciting. I get a thrill out of running a company and being able to say to them, “all right you’re hired, and you’re now the chief operating officer of my company.” It gives me a really good feeling to be able to help my friends out and give them the experience of working at a “real job” at a young age, and still have fun with it. I also enjoy taking trips to places like Las Vegas where I can have fun at conventions where everyone else is much older.

MR: Conversely, what’s the hardest part?

TD: Right now, it’s attending school, running a thriving business and trying not to get in over my head while still having somewhat of a childhood. Most entrepreneurs put so much time and hard work into their business, and while CoolTronics is a good portion of my life, it’s hard to maintain it with school, fun and travel – there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I’ve been able to handle it with good time management and technology like cell phones, which lets me run things while I’m traveling. I also try to combine “fun” travel with business travel, so if I’m going somewhere for business and I know I can have some fun there too, I kill two birds with one stone and get a little vacation in on the side.

MR: Did the tech downturn affect your company?

TD: I founded the company in November 2000, right when the down- turn was starting, so there was really nowhere to go but up. We did over $1 million in 2001, which was our first year of sales, and got affiliated with Dell in late 2001. Prior to that, we could only do consulting services, then direct our clients to Dell.com to purchase their computers. I could not say that our sales went down or up during the tech downturn, but we did notice that customers were being a little more economical about the way they spent money.

MR: What are the pros and cons of being based in the Tampa Bay area?

TD: The close-knit business community is a big advantage for us. Mention someone’s name here and chances are that the person you’re talking to knows them personally or through someone else. I realized the value of this early. When my neighbors with computers talked to their friends at garden club or in the office about my company, word spread to area law firms and small businesses. While the market is small enough that everyone knows each other, it’s big enough to where I can expand my business here and not get caught up with a huge amount of competition from other companies. The size of the area, however, can also be a downside. The Tampa Bay area is vast in scope, and we travel to all of our clients – they don’t come to us. If I have to go to Odessa, then come back to South Tampa then over to the USF area, it can eat up half a day.

MR: What’s ahead for CoolTronics?

TD: We’re in the middle of a huge project right now that could result in 10 to 15 “CoolTronics On Campus” locations across the country by the end of the year. We’re getting support from Dell on this rollout, which will be similar to the kiosks that they’re using in malls, except it will targeted at college students.